ASIS and ASIO in Chile: Transparency and double standards four decades after the coup

On 4 June 2014, the Opposition Shadow Attorney-General, Labor Senator Mark Dreyfus presented a petition to the Federal Parliament on behalf of the Chilean community in Australia. Around 600 Chilean expatriates, most of them Australian citizens, demanded the government approve the extradition request of former intelligence agent Adriana Rivas, who escaped from trial in Chile where she is accused of seven cases of torture and aggravated kidnapping and disappearance (Dreyfus 2014:5619-5621). This petition followed what started a year earlier when Adriana Rivas was found by investigative reporter Florencia Melgar living in one of Sydney's housing commission buildings. The Special Broadcasting Services' report of her declarations (see Melgar 2013a,c,d, 2014) triggered the reaction of human rights movements and political activists in Chile and Australia and the extradition request. These groups are manifestly against the presence of Chilean violators of human rights living in the same land where they, as refugees, were welcomed after Augusto Pinochet's coup d'état in 1973. The fact that Adriana Rivas has been living for decades in Australia might not be a mere coincidence or plain misfortune. According to author Mark Aarons, there have been hundreds of war criminals hidden in Australia since 1945 (see 2001, ABC 2009). This chapter looks into how Australia's involvement in Chile's coup four decades ago remains under a cloak of secrecy, encouraged by the same secret services that seemed to have worked above government and parliament powers. Together with the contentious issue of transparency in today's world, this four-decade old history is still prominent and continues to haunt thousands of Chilean-former refugees living in Australia and many others in Chile that were victims of DINA and other secret services.